Stephen Fry is a man of many talents and has written some good books. Here he has apparently decided, as a kind of perverse literary experiment, to try to push the digressive and facetious style to such an extreme that it resembles pathological lunacy. It's a smashing success. No groan-inducing pun is passed up for section and chapter headings: "Pass the Purcell", "Ringfluential", and worse. Many games are played with typography; there are pointlessly invented composers' diaries and wince-making Carry On-toned historical context setting. There are jokes - "Mozart, now, is the greatest thing to happen to music since someone burnt the blueprints of the banjo" - and a relentlessly camp style: "He's currently in a rather bum-punchingly uncomfortable coach, en route from Vienna to Prague."

Perhaps the publishers were terrified that if readers found themselves more than 10 words away from a bit of toilet humour, they would fall asleep - because, after all, this is about that terribly boring subject, classical music. It needs "enlivening". Not coincidentally, the book derives from Fry's own series on Classic FM. I'm sure it sounded great on the radio, with the tunes and everything.

How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher, by Simon Barnes (Short Books, £9.99)

It says something about the comedic depths that Fry's book has plumbed that, in comparison, Barnes's chapter title "Let's fill the whole screen with tits" seems terribly charming, in an I-know-it's-very-obvious-but-it's-still-quite-funny-isn't-it way. This is a very likable memoir-cum-manual, in which it is argued that you don't have to become a fanatical "twitcher" in order to enjoy looking at birds. (Shooting them, by contrast, is frowned upon.)

Looking at birds, Barnes argues, is a very cheap way to "add to the joys of daily existence". And to learn the names of more birds, and eventually to learn to recognise them in a flash (through a mental faculty called, oddly, "jizz"), is to deepen and reinforce these joys. Certainly it does me good to look at a roast chicken on my plate and to know, through "jizz", that it's a chicken.

About live birds, though, I was still a bit sceptical, but then he mentioned the carmine bee-eater, which is about the only bird I've ever known the name of while looking at it (apart from, you know, pigeons), and I thought he might be on to something after all.